by Karina Halle
CHAPTER SIX
Riley
“Riley, you can carry the litter,” Sam says, handing it over. A litter is basically two pieces of backboard. Sometimes there’s a modified bike wheel attached to the bottom, made for rolling people out, but when we’re dealing with snow and ice, it’s not needed. It’s heavy enough as it is to carry and will slow me down, but I don’t complain, I just take it and strap it on.
This is also the first time I’ve ever spoken to Sam, the retired army man with a buzz-cut and hot pink snow pants. Even though he’s an unpaid volunteer, along with four other people here, he seems to be taking over the operation and Mav steps back, having no problem with it. It must be a lot of pressure having to be in charge of this group of rag-tag SARs. It’s something else I want to talk to Mav about, but it will have to wait for another time.
Right now, I’m focused on the rescue. I talked to Mav in the truck on the way up here, wanting something to distract me and he does a pretty damn good job of that. A little too good. But honestly, tonight, I really am nervous and I’ve been trying hard to seem composed. Maybe a little too hard. All humor has left me, I’m shutting down, becoming a machine. I just hope it gets the job done.
We’re standing in a parking lot at the ski lodge. It’s late now, past midnight, and the place is quiet. The lower slopes are lit up, but the snow is filtering the light. The chairlifts swing in the wind. It’s unbelievably cold and I wished I had put on an extra pair of gloves.
“Everyone set?” Mav asks, eyeing us all. Even though he let Sam take the reins for a bit, it’s so obvious that Mav is meant for this job. He exudes confidence and control and because of that, people listen to him. Even Neil, who is usually saying something to undermine him or giving him side-eye, is sober looking and paying attention.
We head out into the snow. I’m at the back with only Tim behind me. Maverick leads, followed by Sam and everyone else. Our headlamps are all shining, casting our path in an eerie blue, our skis sliding rhythmically. At least the freshly fallen snow has made it easier to ski, I had been expecting it hard-packed and icy after the warm weather we’ve had for the last ten days.
We ski for hours, into the night. We don’t stop for a break. I’m in shape, I’ve spent my afternoons running through the snow, going to the gym down the street. I’ve never stopped working out, even after the accident. But now my lungs are burning. The lactic acid in my legs is building up. My pack is too heavy. Why the fuck am I carrying the litter? Was that a test, to see if I would do it, the only woman among all these men? Well I fucking passed the test, didn’t I? I’m that proud that I took it.
The wind dies down a bit, the only respite, and big, fat flakes illuminate in my lamp, along with the wispy tendrils of my frozen breath.
It’s still cold though and despite all my layers and the non-stop skiing, I’m not sweating underneath. I wonder if I’ll ever feel warm again. I long to be back in Mav’s truck, the heat on, just the two of us. It seemed so safe back then. Now everything is dark and wild and though I’m surrounded by a competent team, fear lurks where I can’t see it, only feel it.
Finally, we come to a stop. I can’t feel anything. Everyone is talking but I’m not really listening. Headlamps are pointing in all directions, cancelling everyone out.
A hand comes on my shoulder and I look up to see Mav for a split second before his lamp blinds me.
“Sorry,” he says, moving it to the side. “How are you?”
I nod. “Cold,” I tell him. “But okay.”
“We’re taking five minutes,” he says. “But only five. You need water and you need something to eat.”
“I’m fine,” I say but my words sound dull. Before I know what he’s doing, he’s taking the litter off of me.
“I’m carrying this from now on,” he says. “You did a good job, but we all share the duties, you got it?”
I’m too tired to argue. I let him take it and my shoulders lift up, immediately feeling lighter. Then he shoves an electrolyte gel pack in my hand and a bottle of water. “Eat that, then drink that, and then we’ll go.”
I nod, happy to do what I’m told.
But Mav runs a tight ship and I’ve barely finished the bottle when we start off again. This time though we only go for half an hour, well above the tree line, until we come to the top of a chute between two rock walls. While the snow has been steady during our ski up here, we’ve rounded the mountainside by now, facing east, which is warmer. There are some exposed rocks on the ridges and our lamps catch trickles of water running down them.
Below us is the chute, the wind having packed it with snow. It’s dark and steep and we can’t see where it goes.
Maverick, Sam, Tim, and Tony lie down on their stomachs overlooking the drop and talk amongst themselves. And by talk, I mean yell. Even though the wind has died down there’s something about being in the dark, on a steep mountain face, that makes you think you need to scream to be heard.
But for all their talking and yelling about what to do next, there are two other voices in the night, far, far below. A faint “help” and “over here.”
Maverick yells back for them to not move, that help is on the way. Even if they could move, and we’re assuming at least the other skier can, they can’t come up. Only we can go down.
And yet, no one is moving.
“Riley,” Mav says, waving me over. “Come over here. I want your opinion.”
All eyes go to me as I ski forward close to where Mav is lying down, and then carefully and quickly take my skis off.
Slowly, I lower myself to my knees, the cold snow biting through my clothes and then on to my stomach, right up beside Mav. I’m good at climbing and I enjoy it, but the irony is that I’m not a fan of heights. I rarely look down and when I do, I at least feel secure in my harness.
But now, I don’t have my harness on yet and even though I’m flat on the ground, I’m not prepared for what I see when I look over.
It just seems to drop away into nothing and the vertigo washes over me so fast that I have to close my eyes and breathe.
“Pretty fucking nuts, huh,” Mav says softly. His breath is warm on my cheek.
I can’t even nod. I don’t want to move an inch.
“What do you think?” he asks and I notice that unlike his earlier conversation with Sam and Tim, he’s not yelling at me. He’s almost whispering, as if we’re having a private conversation on the ledge of a three-hundred-foot chute that ends in blackness.
“What do you mean?”
“Do you think the chute will hold?”
I look back to the dripping water, the change in air temperature on this side of the mountain. The water over time will make the snowpack heavier. The heavier the snowpack on top, the more likely it will slide.
“It might hold for now, but maybe not in an hour. Maybe not even now. And definitely not enough for all of us to go down.”
He gives me a smile. “I agree. So the question is, who is going down?”
“Is that innuendo?” It’s a feeble joke, but it’s the only way for me to deal with how serious this all is. Or maybe it isn’t serious at all, maybe they all deal with this all the time. Maybe it’s been too long for me and maybe I am still too scarred from what happened with Levi.
“Of course,” he says. “But I also want to know what you think.” He looks over his shoulder at the others, half who are watching us, the other half arguing over what to do. Tim is the avalanche expert and he seems to think it will hold. Sam and Tony say it won’t.
“Is this the kind of thing where my vote decides?” I ask Mav.
He shakes his head, snowflakes falling off his lashes and brows. “No. I’m going down there. Just wondered if you wanted to come. You can stay up here and ski back down the way we came. Or you can hang tight and do radio relay with Tony.”
“Isn’t there another way?”
“We routed the descent from a slightly different spot so half of the initial descent with the litter is going
to be more complicated before it joins up with the original plan. Sam says we could go down further to the east, but that will add an extra two hours and those people are right down there. They’re talking, they’re alive, but they won’t last the night here. We just don’t have the time.”
“Or you do have the time. You can play it safe and hope they hang on.”
“I don’t play it safe,” he says.
Well, you’ve been playing it pretty safe with me so far. I don’t even know how that thought had the nerve to show up in my brain right now, but there you go.
“Not in these situations, anyway,” he adds, as if he knows what I’m thinking. “If you’re not in this business to risk your life, why are you in it?”
But I know why so many of the others are hesitant. Because they have families. They have other people they need to take care of in their lives. Mav doesn’t. Neither do I.
“I’m in,” I tell him. “Let’s go.”
He stares into my eyes for a moment, searching, and I know he wants to ask me if I’m sure and I also know that if he asks me, I might say no and back out. But he doesn’t ask and so now I’m committed.
Shit.
Things just got real.
“Okay,” Mav says to the team, inching away from the edge before getting to his feet. “If you’re staying, ski back to where we had our break and wait there. If you’re coming down with us, let’s go.”
Carefully, I inch back too. In fact, I inch back until I’m pretty much past the group before I get to my feet, Tony helping me up.
“You okay to do this?” Tony asks.
I dust off my pants and torso. “I think so.”
“You could wait a few hours. That’s when the chute will slide. Then we could go down.”
“But if we wait, they could die.”
“It’s your first outing with the team,” Neil says, coming over.
I manage to stay civil. “Go big or go home.”
“Well I’m fucking going home,” he says. “Back to my bed. You’re welcome to join me.” I glare at him so hard until he realizes what he’s said. He turns to Tony. “You too, Tony.”
“No thanks.”
Meanwhile, Mav gets on the radio and calls it in to the local authorities and the lodge to tell them what we’re going to do. And I get what we’re going to do, I’m just not sure how we’re going to do it. The chute looks so steep, I wish I could just ride the litter down like a sled.
But after most of the team leaves, Mav starts explaining it to the brave or stupid ones like myself who have stayed behind. Funny how I was just commenting on the skiers being stupid, risking their neck for the hiker, when now I’m risking my own neck for them.
Tony is one of the ones staying, but his job is to stay where we are right now and do radio relay. He sits among our skis, wraps his legs in an emergency blanket, and waits.
Maverick goes first down the chute, followed by Tim, then Jace, then a guy named Pete, then me. It’s steep and slick but we take it slow, one step at a time, moving sideways almost like a crab. My headlamp illuminates my ski boots, a foot of snow, and then blackness beyond until it comes to headlamp after headlamp, little blue dots in the dark.
Once we reach the bottom of the chute in one piece, Mav radios up to Tony who tells us that the base is expecting the temperature to start dropping soon. Which is good, because rain would have ended us.
Mav starts calling for the hiker and skier and they eventually answer back, though their voices are fainter than before.
“Did they move?” I ask him.
“No,” he says, the light from his lamp moving in a dizzying arc as he shakes his head. “They’re still there, they’re just weaker. We have to move fast. Let me do a beacon search.”
Mav pulls out the Recco, a handheld detector that locates the tiny reflectors that’s sewn in some outdoor gear. We locate one, a couple hundred yards away, though even with Mav’s map it’s hard to tell what’s between us and them. A cliff face? Avalanche debris? A sheet of ice? After all, the hiker was an ice hiker, wearing crampons. If those can’t stick to the surface, I don’t know what can. According to the other skier, he slid fifty feet and almost went over a cliff face, using his leg to stop him. Unfortunately, he shattered his leg in doing so, right up against a rock.
We work quickly through the basin, ever so aware that the cornices are hanging high above us, waiting to fall. It would be another avalanche and in the middle of the night, with only Tony up there, it’s doubtful any of us would survive.
I’m scared. Especially as we come to a section of avalanche debris that I know is unstable but we have no choice but to cross it.
But I can’t move. It’s like my legs are refusing, cementing me in place. There’s terror in going forward and safety where I am, even though I know that safety is only an illusion.
Mav comes back to me as Tim goes first across it. He grabs my hand and gives it a squeeze. “You okay?”
I nod frantically, my voice shaking. “Yes.”
“You’re scared.”
“I’m not.”
“You should be.”
I give him a sharp look. “What?”
“You should be scared,” he says again, voice low and grave. “It’s healthy. It protects you. But you have to let it in and you have to deal with it head on. I know this is a lot and I know you’re just getting back in the game. So the fear is only natural. But don’t push it away. Don’t think you can outrun it. Fear will always find you. Better you find it first.”
And I don’t know how, but Mav’s words have an affect on me. Standing there, at the edge of a debris field, with cornices hanging three hundred feet above us, knowing everything can let go right now in the darkness and we’ll be buried in seconds, I go after the fear. I let it in.
I let it out.
And we get moving.
Twenty minutes later, after careful walking, sinking into the snow up to our waist in some places, we find the hiker and skier, their backs against an exposed rock.
Both are hypothermic and the hiker has gone into shock, but the skier says it was only recently and he had done a good job of wrapping him up in emergency blankets and garbage bags that act as a bivvy, keeping him dry and warm.
We’re all EMTs, but Tim is a medic and tends to the hiker’s leg, which is fractured in more than a few places. It’s absolutely gruesome to see Tim work, but he gets it done by the light of our headlamps and in the falling snow, setting the leg, bandaging it up, and getting the hiker on the litter we’ve put together. Mav phones it in to Tony, who will take our skis and meet us along with everyone else.
Mav and Tim hold the litter from each end and we carefully make our way sideways, avoiding the slick slope that the hiker lost control on. Pete and I support the skier, whose name is Garrett, and keep him talking the entire time just to keep him moving and awake and alive.
By the time we meet up with the group at the halfway point, they take over, letting us have a bit of a rest before following.
Then we ski all the way back down the hill to the lodge.
It’s six a.m. The sky is lighting up in the corners, but it will still be a couple of hours until the sun makes an appearance. Then, somehow, we’re back in Mav’s truck, just the two of us, roaring down the mountain through the pre-dawn.
We don’t talk much. I was running on adrenaline that entire ski back to the lodge, but now my brain is numb. My body is numb. I can’t even feel the heat from the heater. I can’t really feel anything except a faint wash of relief. Relief that I did it. And yeah, we totally saved some lives. But mainly, my relief is selfish. I still have what it takes. Losing Levi didn’t break me.
“You did good, kid,” Mav says to me as he pulls up outside my house.
I look to him, my eyes skirting over his nose, his lips. The small smile on them. I’m suddenly hit with a wallop of loneliness, an urge to be warm again, to feel something, someone. I want nothing more than to invite him inside. After the night we had, I
have a feeling that this time he won’t say no. Trauma builds camaraderie. Fear makes bonds. In one night, we’ve grown closer than before.
Please come inside, I want to say, willing my mouth to open, to say it. I want to grab his hand, hold it. I want him in my bed, deep inside me.
But I don’t say a word, not that anyway. I just say, “Thanks. I’ll see you later.”
And then I get out of his truck and into the house before I do anything that both of us might regret.
7
CHAPTER SEVEN
Riley
I sleep until three in the afternoon. I don’t get any calls, and when I finally open my eyes and check my phone, I don’t have any texts either.
In that small space between waking up and checking my phone, there was a warm sense of peace. A bit of the “yay, I saved a life” running through me and the sticky soft fragments of deep sleep. Plus there’s this soft winter light coming through the window. The storm from last night is over.
But after I check my phone and don’t see a thing, the warmth is replaced by loneliness. The kind of loneliness that hurts, like something cold and hard and dark is dissolving inside you like a bath bomb. It’s a chill in your soul, the type that only a strong embrace can get rid of. Sometimes, I just want to be held.
I don’t know what I expected. Maybe a text from Maverick, telling me I was needed into work. Or maybe touching on last night. Maybe just checking up on me.
And that’s when it hits me, that realization that, fuck, the only person who might possibly do that is my own boss. I’ve only known him for ten days or so. Other than him, there’s no one. There’s been no one for the last two years of my life.
It’s by choice. I chose to leave my family back in Washington because they are toxic people. My mother is a drug addict, always choosing pills or whatever she can get her hands on over me, over my father. And my father is a criminal. He’s constantly on parole. He’s always going in and out of jail. Sometimes I wonder who even raised me since neither of them were ever there.